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Oz Reimagined: New Tales from the Emerald City and Beyond, eds. John Joseph Adams and Douglas Cohen. (47North, 978-61099041, 365 pages.) Cover art and interior illustrations by Galen Dara.

Pandemonium: The Lowest Heaven, eds. Anne C. Perry and Jared Shurin. (Jurassic London, 978-0-9571696-9-2, 351 pages.) Cover art by Joey Hi-Fi. Interior illustrations from the National Maritime Musuem.

Interzone 246.

 

Ever since L. Frank Baum wrote The Wizard of Oz in 1900, and followed it up with more than a dozen sequels, the enchanted land of Oz has established itself as one of the most potent Dreamlands in fantasy, rivaled only by Neverland, Narnia, and Middle Earth. The classic 1939 film adaptation starring Judy Garland, shown every year on television for decades, has established the mythology of Oz (or at least the film’s version of that mythology) so firmly that there’s hardly a child anywhere who hasn’t heard of the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, the Cowardly Lion, the Ruby Slippers (silver in the book), Toto, the Yellow Brick Road, the Emerald City, and Dorothy—but there has been no shortage of stories by other hands that adapt and reinterpret what might be called The Matter of Oz, including another long series of Oz sequels by Ruth Plumly Thompson, revisionist takes on the canon like Gregory Maguire’s Wicked and Philip Jose Farmer’s A Barnstormer of Oz, and stories obviously deeply informed by the mythology of Oz, although they use it in their own ways, such as Geoff Ryman’s Was and Gene Wolfe’s “The Eyeflash Miracles.”

Now we get an original anthology made up of the latest crop of Oz reinterpretations, Oz Reimagined: New Tales From the Emerald City and Beyond, edited by John Joseph Adams and Douglas Cohen. The stories here can be sorted out into three main categories: stories that take the mythology of Oz seriously and treat it with respect even while tweaking it in various clever ways; stories that reinvent the Oz mythology in the language of another genre or another culture, such as Ken Liu’s “The Veiled Shanghai,” which translates the Oz tropes to Chinese mythology and sets the tale in Hong Kong, or David Farland’s “Dead Blue,” where the Tin Man becomes a cyborg, the Wicked Witch a mechmage, and a wormhole replaces the tornado; or stories that set out to deliberately demythify Oz, giving us a cynical, hard-edged, revisionist modern take on it instead, demonstrating that the Dream has died, if it ever existed in the first place. Some of this demythification is a bit mean-spirited, considering that it’s applied to a beloved children’s classic. The book does come with a warning label, but you have to wonder how a youngish child in love with the Judy Garland movie is going to feel if they pick this up and see stories that cast Dorothy as a lesbian or a suicidal mental patient or a ruthless, cold-blooded murderer, or show an Emerald City full of squalid slums and drug pushers, or portray the Land of Oz itself as a brutal genocidal dystopia? The problem with demythifying stories is that you then can no longer call on the power of the myth.

The best stories here are probably Tad Williams’s “The Boy Detective of Oz: An Otherworld Story,” which translates Oz into a Virtual Reality World where a bizarre crime is being investigated by a network troubleshooter, and Jane Yolen’s “Blown Away,” which, somewhat in the fashion of Ryman’s Was, retells the Oz story as a determinedly mundane mainstream story, but one in which it is possible to see the marvelous and the wonderful shimmering just under the surface, as if under the thinnest of curtains. There’s also good work in Oz Reimagined by Orson Scott Card, Seanan McGuire, Simon R. Green, Theodora Goss, Dale Bailey, Jonathan Maberry, and others, and although some of the bleaker revisionist takes on Oz seemed pointlessly and rather gleefully nihilistic to me, on the whole this is a solidly entertaining anthology, and worth a read.

Another eccentric small press anthology is Pandemonium: The Lowest Heaven, edited by Anne C. Perry and Jared Shurin, an original SF anthology produced to coincide with the Exhibition Visions of the Universe at Royal Museums Greenwich; each story is illustrated with a picture from the Exhibition, which used over a hundred astronomical photographs and drawings to show “how advances in imaging technology have repeatedly transformed our understanding of the Universe and our own place within it.” The idea behind The Lowest Heaven was to demonstrate “what happens when a group of today’s most imaginative writers are let loose in the gigantic playground of the Solar System,” which sounds great—the result, however, is not as impressive as it might have been, as the anthology produced is extremely uneven in literary quality, with some excellent material nestled in amongst a number of noticeably weaker stories. For an anthology with close ties to astronomy and technological progress, it’s somewhat disappointing that the science in some of the stories is as non-rigorous as it is, occasionally verging on very non-rigorous indeed, and that there are a number of what we used to call “Bat Durston” stories here, where the story is ostensibly set on Venus but Venus is just like Earth, complete with motels and gas-stations. I would have liked to have seen more core science fiction used, since many of the stories here are fantasy, some are slipstream, and some are straight mainstream, with only the faint traces of a connection to the anthology’s supposed theme. On the whole, although there is worthwhile material here, some of it quite good, I felt that overall Jonathan Strahan did a much better job of exploring a similar theme in last year’s Edge of Infinity.

The best stories here are “A Map of Mercury,” by Alastair Reynolds, in which an emissary must deal with groups of artists who are in the process of renouncing and abandoning their organic human existence, and “Only Human,” by Lavie Tidhar, a story set out on the edges of his Central Station universe which also deals with the temptation to abandon ordinary human life for technologically-generated transcendence, and the price that might have to be paid for doing so. Both of these are superior stories, well above the genre average. Also in The Lowest Heaven: Adam Roberts’s “An Account of a Voyage From World to World Again, by way of the Moon, 1726, in the commission of Georgius Rex Primus, Monarch of Northern Europe and Lord of Selenic Territories, Defender of the Faith. Undertaken by Captain Wm Chetwin aboard the Cometes Georgius,” related to his 2012 story “An Account of a Voyage...” (etc.), takes an 18th Century explorer to the Moon by balloon for a sequence of hairsbreadth adventures, and Jon Courtenay Grimwood first tells a Philip K. Dick-like story and then deconstructs it, in “The Jupiter Files.” Also good here are stories by Simon Morden, E.J. Swift, Kameron Hurley, and Matt Jones.

This is going to be very hard to find in the United States, even Amazon doesn’t have it available for sale yet, so if you want it, you’d probably be best advised to order it direct from the publisher at www.pandemonium-fiction.com.

Fantasy outweighs SF in Interzone 246, where five out of the eight stories could be considered to be fantasy of one sort or another. The best story here is certainly Lavie Tidhar’s “The Core,” another of his recent sequence of Central Station stories and undoubtedly SF; all the Central Station stories are meant to fit into a larger mosaic pattern, and draw strength from their associations with other stories even if they don’t conventionally resolve, but you might have trouble understanding “The Core” if you haven’t read Tidhar’s earlier “The Bookseller,” in Interzone 245, to which it is a direct sequel. Also good is the James White Award winner, “You First Meet the Devil,” by new writer Shannon Fay, a poignant Deal With The Devil fantasy where the Devil travels to Liverpool to try to inveigle the so-called Fifth Beatle. “Cat World,” by new writer Georgina Bruce is set in a near-future society that could be ours only a few years down the road, a society where abandoned, homeless children in constant danger of being forced into a life of prostitution gain momentary relief from their desperate existence by chewing psychedelic gum that transports them to an illusionary Virtual Reality world, a trope that reminds me of the use of Chew-Z in Philip K. Dick’s The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch; the story is strong and well-crafted, although extremely bleak—although at least there is a touch of hope allowed at the very end, as the child protagonist vows to keep fighting against her fate. Aliette de Bodard’s beautifully written “The Angel at the Heart of the Rain” is a near-mainstream story about the refugee experience, with a touch of allegorical fantasy added.

The rest of the stories in the issue are weaker. Nigel Brown’s “Sentry Duty” is also undoubtedly SF, but a story where I could see the twist ending coming a mile away. Priya Sharma’s “Thesea and Astaurius” is a slipstream retelling of the Minotaur myth, with occasional anachronistic elements thrown in. Steven J. Dines’s “The Machinehouse Worker’s Song” is another allegorical fantasy (so called by me because the physical setup here could not possibly work in the real world) about a man trapped for his entire life inside a claustrophobic Kafkaesque factory, doing mind-numbingly repetitious tasks the purpose of which he doesn’t understand (we get it, really!). Jess Hyslop’s “Triolet” takes place in a fantasy world where flowers are grown to recite poetry aloud, and uses that framework to tell a fairly conventional tale of a couple falling out of love with each other.

I must say that I’m not happy to see all of the fantasy that has been creeping into Interzone in recent issues, although some of it has been well-executed; I’d like to see more core SF and perhaps even some harder science fiction in the magazine, which, after all, was once the natural home of writers such as Alastair Reynolds, Charles Stross, Greg Egan, Paul McAuley, and Iain Banks.